Blaming anything when it is obvious that weaknesses in parenting is the true cause is a fruitless gesture. Even when most listeners will pretend to agree that television is bad for children, they are really thinking that the only thing to do is to monitor and control the children’s access to television!

The “formative years” are called that for a reason. The human character, personality, basic education, social skills, physical body, and mental health are built during those years. Parents who want no one to interfere with their parenting can blame no one or no thing else when the child reaches the age of puberty as a poorly formed and dysfunctional human being.

Parents are the first to give their children the hard core foundations of their moral and social education. The character that the child will carry for the rest of their lives is formed by the parents.  Parents are responsible for providing a safe place where the children are loved and where someone can be trusted to take the proper authority over them and their entire world. If there are problems in the home, then over exposure to adult television shows or films will make those problems much worse by offering terrible ways to deal with life. Adults can handle the “terrible” part, but children are not ready to make the distinction between “effective” and “terrible”. 

But control and monitoring of the child’s life is not so easy for many parents to handle these days. Even when only one parent works, children spend a good part of their day away from them at school where other children discuss programming that is inappropriate for their maturity level and pressure each other to watch the shows. Then they come up with all kinds of real world ideas and share them.

Single parent households take a bad rap for not being a “nuclear family”. But so called “nuclear” families have never really been the American dream. Abuse, trauma and drama goes on in a lot of households where both parents are present. No matter what type of home life a child has, television often becomes the babysitter or provides an escape into a world of even more dysfunction.

As for the younger children who are going through their formative years, perhaps the best options are to limit the access to television at home and to make sure to talk about the content that children access when not at home, so that any trauma or wrong paths in thinking can be dealt with before they become real problems. 

Here are some warnings about specific content:

Specifically, the shows and films that encourage sexual behavior or obsession with looks in young girls; or the shows that encourage aggressive martial arts, stunts, or wrestling moves in boys are the ones that are the most dangerous. Children often cannot separate reality from staged fantasy. Many will soak up the glamour, praise and reward that is handed out on the shows and will attempt to get those things in real life.

The movies and shows that demonstrate graphic violence or sadistic killing as an “explainable” fact of life should be prohibited and blanked out. Films such as the “Saw” series or television shows like “Dexter” are the most dangerous shows in history. They show every detail of what it is like to be a sadistic torturer or serial killer, but add a twisted moral message that all of the victims are evil or have committed crimes. This has not so surprisingly caused many young people to think that justice can be served with serial killing through sadism, murder and torture. The character “Dexter” is a cult hero to some.

Shows that detail the lives of criminals who deal drugs, manufacture crystal methamphetamine, become corrupted officials and otherwise mess up their lives are also something that should be accompanied by moral lessons where the horrors that the characters suffer are more important to pay attention to than the brief bits of high life that they live.

Shows that make people think that they can get rich quick, get their political views or news from one source, or mix music with glamour with graphic sex can also give a twisted view of the world. These can be dealt with by talking about the realities of game show winning, showing how much work goes into the fake glamour, aggressively outlawing foul and disrespectful language and attitude, monitoring for extremist and false news stories, and talking frankly about healthy sex. 

In the end, no one knows of a “one size fits all” solution for parenting in the age of instant and constant content distribution, but monitoring, correcting, controlling access and discussing are tactics that have served many parents well. As for the rest of society, ignoring the worst of content will make that content unprofitable to the point that it will go away. But the odds of that happening are not good.